SharePoint Videos

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

You can save sites in SharePoint Server 2007 as custom site templates using the browser via the Site Settings –> Look and Feel > Save Site as Template.

Note:If you have the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Feature enabled, then the Save Site as Template link will not appear.

The Save Site as Template link will save the site template to the site collection Site Template Gallery and the site template will then become available for subsites within the site collection.

But, if you want to create a top level site template which you can use as the root site when creating new site collections throughout Web applications, you’ll need to use the SharePoint STSADM command line tool to install the custom site template.

The top level site templates are accessed when creating a new site collection in Central Administration –Central Administration > Application Management > Create Site Collection.SharePoint will automatically generate a Custom tab in the Template Selection where any custom site templates will be available for selection.

To install a custom site template using STSADM, where the site template is named exercise and located in the root of Drive C:stsadm –o addtemplate –filename c:\exercise.stp –title exercise Note:An iisreset will be necessary before the template is made available.

Other template-related commands include:1. To enumerate custom site templates on a SharePoint server:stsadm –o enumtemplates2. To delete a custom site template:stsadm –o deletetemplate –title exerciseNote:An iisreset will be necessary to complete template removal.

4 comments:

I found this very helpful - thank you - but I notice that the 2 workflows that I created in Sharepoint Designer 2007 in my original site do not exist in the new top-level site which was created based on the custom template. Any ideas why?

What about workflows you create in Visual Studio? do those workfows publish and migrate with the new site template? I tried backing up a site and publishing it to a new site collection. the Workflow migrated, but all the connections broke, and when I tried to reconnect them to the given lists, the workflow created variable (this is all done through SPD 2007) goes away, and i have to recreate the "create" variable that is created by the WF to create in a separate list.